To get started creating your first project in After Effects, you will need to build your graphic in a composition. A composition is a container where you can layer multiple files together to create a file known as a composite. Layers can be created from many different kinds of files.
To show you what I mean, let’s get started building our first composition. There are two primary ways you can create compositions in After Effects. The first way is to go to the Composition menu in the Menu bar and chose New Composition...In here, you want to make sure you are in the Basic settings. At the top, you can name the composition under the Composition Name. I will leave mine set to Comp 1. Then you want to go ahead and click on the Preset pull-down, and in here you can choose whatever resolution and framerate you would like to work at. Go ahead and choose the preset or just click out of the menu. You can also set your Frame Rate, how many frames are going to play back at every second, and you can set the Duration of the project.
I have several numbers here, and they work from left to right. We have 0 hours, 00 minutes, 10 seconds and 00 frames based on a 30 frames per second Frame Rate. You can also set the Background Color in the bottom of your Composition Settings. I am going to click to Cancel because I don’t want to use any of these settings to create a new composition. I want to create a composition that will match my video footage exactly. So, if you click once on the video footage in the Project panel, notice we can see it’s already 1920 x 1080,0;00;10;29.97 fps. To create a composition from this footage, I will just click on the footage and drag it down to the Composition button and then let go. Notice now the Composition has been created, and the video file has been added into the Timeline.
Let’s add our logo into the Timeline as well. Come back up to the Project panel, click on the APEAK_Logo.ai file and drag it down to the Timeline. Notice as we get over the Summer_Forest.mp4 layer, if I go over top or below, I get a blue highlight showing me exactly where I am going to place this element. Let’s place it above Layer 1 in the Timeline. With the logo in the Timeline, let’s change when the logo appears over time. Make sure Layer 1 is selected, and then go to the right side of the Timeline. The thing you want to pay attention to as you are moving layers around in time is the location of the Current Time Indicator, which is this blue line here on the left side. And if you come to the top of that blue line, you can click and drag and that will allow you to reposition the Current Time Indicator. So, right now as I am dragging, I am going through a process called scrubbing.
So, move your Current Time Indicator down to 2 seconds in the Timeline, and you know it’s two seconds because the upper left corner of the Timeline, it says 0;00;02;00. Now to slide this layer in the Timeline, you can click anywhere in this purple area and just click and drag. Notice you get little grippy lines underneath, and as I reposition the layer, look at the Info panel in the upper right corner of the interface.Notice the Duration doesn’t change, only the In and Out points of the layer. Go ahead and let go of the mouse, and press Ctrl + Z on windows or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that latest slide. Instead of sliding the layer, I want to trim the layers' In point. So, let’s hover over the In point, which is the left side of the layer until the mouse turns into a double arrow icon, then click and drag, and as you are dragging, if you hold down Shift after you start to drag, the In point will snap to the Current Time Indicator.
So, go ahead and do that and make sure the layers' In point has gone to 0;00;02;00.Now, if we look at the Info panel in the upper right corner, notice the Duration is 0;00;08;00,and the In point is now moved to 0;00;02;00. Once again, that function is called trimming. Now, sometimes when you are working on compositions, you have to go back and change the composition settings. Let’s make our composition five seconds long, by selecting the composition in the Project panel, clicking on it once, and then we can go to the Composition menu and go to Composition Settings.
With the Composition Settings open, let’s go to the Duration area, highlight all the numbers and change it to say 500. Now you notice on the right side here, it says it's 0;00;05;00 long. When you click OK, notice the Timeline is much shorter now, it’s only 5 seconds long. Now as I am looking at this logo, it’s kind of hard to read on the background. So, I’d like to add a color wash over top of that video layer. To do that, I will create a layer solid. Let’s go up to the Menu bar, click on Layer, and notice I can’t choose New anything because I have the wrong panel active. See how the project panel is active? Let’s click once on the Timeline to make the Timeline active. Then we can go up under the Layer menu and choose New Solid...When you go to your Solid Settings, make sure to choose Make Comp Size and then click on the Eyedropper to sample a color from the Composition. I will sample this green, and then go up and name the layer solid Green. Click OK when you are done.
Let’s reposition this vertically in the Timeline by clicking on the layer and dragging it between our logo and the background layer. Now instead of this being 100% opaque, I want to bring the opacity down a little bit. So, with Layer 2 selected, I will open up the layer options by clicking on the triangle, and then I can open up the Transform options.
At the bottom here, I have options here for Opacity. Let’s change that setting from 100% to 80% and press Enter on your keyboard. If we collapse Layer 2, I want you to know compositions support many different kinds of layers.
In this composition, we have a video layer on the bottom, which was imported into the project, a Green layer solid which we were generating from within After Effects, and an Illustrator file, which we imported into our project.

What you learned: Build a composition

In the menu bar, choose Composition > New Composition to create an empty composition. Use the preset drop-down menu in the Composition Settings dialog box to choose a preset resolution. You can customize a preset by typing in your own values, like width, height, frame rate & duration

Drag footage onto the new composition icon in the bottom of the Project panel to automatically place it in a new composition, matching the footage settings exactly.

Compositions can contain layers generated within After Effects and layers from external files such as files from Illustrator or Photoshop.

Compositions are composed of a stack of layers in the Timeline panel.

Layers can be moved vertically to change appearance in the stack, and horizontally to change the appearance of layers over time.

Position layers in a composition

Explore techniques to position layers in a composition.

There are many ways to position, scale, and rotate layers in a composition, both using the Timeline and directly from within the Composition panel itself. Let’s start by transforming the layer directly in the Composition panel. Go to the Tool panel in the upper left corner of the interface and make sure you have the Selection tool selected, then navigate over to the logo in the Composition panel and click once to select it. And you will notice the logo is selected when you see the control handles around the outside edge of the layer. Now we are going to reposition this logo into the lower right corner of the Composition panel. And as we do that, we will click inside the handles making sure not to click directly on this center anchor point. So, I am going to click inside the handles and drag to the lower right corner of the Composition panel. And when you get somewhere close to the edge, it doesn’t have to be exact, just go ahead and let go of your mouse. Now to scale the logo down, let’s move our mouse to one of the corner handles and then click and drag directly on the handle, and if you just click and drag, notice you can accidentally distort the logo. To keep it in proportion, hold down Shift after you start to drag. So, I am going to scale this down to about 60%, and I know it’s 60% because I see that in the Info panel. Now in order to let go, I am going to let go of my mouse first, and then I will let go of Shift. That way I don’t accidentally distort the logo. You may have noticed when I adjusted the Scale, the scale adjusted around this center anchor point. This is called the anchor point of the layer. And the anchor point also determines what point the object rotates around. Now I am going to go back up to my Toolbar, and I will click on the Rotation tool. You can also press W on your keyboard to select that tool. With the Rotation tool active, notice how the cursor changes. Now if I hover over one of the corner handles and click and drag, I can rotate the logo. And if I hold down Shift as I drag, it will snap in 45-degree increments. Once you've finished playing with the Rotation tool, go ahead and make sure the logo is back in its original vertical position and press V on your keyboard to grab the Selection tool from the Tool panel. Another way to position objects in the scene is through the Timeline. So, let’s go to Layer 1 and open the triangle so we can see the Transform options. If your Transform options are not open, go ahead and click on the triangle until you can see all the different Transform options. Notice with all of the options open, we run out of vertical Transform options the Timeline rather quickly. So, there is an easier way to access each of on these different parameters. I am going to press P on my keyboard to open the Position parameter. And with Position open, I have two parameters here – X and Y. And notice when I hover over any of the parameters, I get a double arrow icon with the finger, which means I can scrub that parameter. So, let’s hover over the Y parameter and click and drag to scrub and reposition this element a little further down in our Composition panel. In order to work quickly on the Timeline, you will want to use keyboard shortcuts. We already know P for Position, but there is also S for Scale, R for Rotation, T for Opacity, and A for Anchor Point. I am going to scrub on the Anchor Point Y parameter. Let’s click and drag and I will reposition the anchor point in between our logo word and our logo mark. Now when I press R and open Rotation, notice Rotation has two parameters. The first one is the number of rotations, the second parameter is actual degrees within a rotation. So, I will hover over the second parameter, click and drag to scrub and now notice it’s going to rotate around my repositioned anchor point. So, I will just Ctrl + Z on Windows or Command + Z on the Mac to undo, and I will press P to open the Position parameter and scrub on the Y parameter to reposition this backdown. In addition to being able to scrub our parameters, you can also just type directly into the parameter. So, let’s make this logo a little more transparent. So, I will press T for Opacity, and I will change its value from 100% to 50%, and I will press Enter when I am finished and that will set the value. Now once you are finished, in order to collapse a layer, you can just press the same keyboard shortcut, so for example, I will press T for Opacity, and I will just click below any of the layers to deselect. And now I can see exactly what things are going to look like in the Composition panel. Now I have to tell you, my preferred method for applying transformations to layers and compositions is to actually work directly in the Timeline. That way you will know exactly which layer and parameter you will be adjusting while getting a preview of the transition. This method definitely becomes more helpful the more layers you have in a composition.

What you learned: Position layers in a composition

There are many ways to position layers in a composition:

Layer handles (in Composition panel with selected layer): Click and drag inside the handles to reposition a layer in the Composition panel. Click a handle to scale or distort a layer. Hold Shift when dragging handles to keep proportions.

Tools (upper left under menu bar): Press W to select the Rotation tool to rotate layers in the Composition panel. Press V to choose the Selection tool.

Layer parameters (triangle on the left side of a layer in the timeline): Click on triangle to open, then open Transform properties by clicking its triangle.

Quick Access parameters (keyboard shortcuts): Press P for Position, R for Rotation, S for Scale, T for Opacity, A for Anchor Point

Adjust Layers (using parameters in the timeline): Scrub on parameter values to change parameters. Hold Shift when scrubbing on a parameter to change values 10 times faster.

Create your first animation

Record multiple keyframes to create animation.

In this tutorial, we will create an animation using keyframes. In After Effects, when you record a keyframe, you are recording the specific value of a parameter at a specific point in time. To better understand how to set keyframes, let’s get started with our project. If you look at the top of the Timeline, you will notice I have two Illustrator layers, and if I turn the Visibility of Layer 1 off, you will notice that’s my text layer. And then if I do the same for Layer 2, that’s the layer that contains my graphic. These are the only two layers we are going to be animating. Let’s get started by fading in the text. So, I will select Layer 1 and in order to control the opacity, I need to open the Opacity settings. The keyboard shortcut for that is T for Opacity. Since I want this to fade up from 0, I am going to change the Opacity parameter to a setting of 0%, and then I will set my first keyframe by clicking on the Stopwatch to the left of the parameter. Notice the second I do that, I will get a keyframe that appears in the Timeline directly under the Current Time Indicator. Since it was at frame 0;00;00;00, that’s where my keyframe is. Now, in order to create animation, I need to have at least two keyframes in two different places in the Timeline. Let’s move our Current Time Indicator down the Timeline to about one second. To be a little more precise, I will just go to the upper left corner of the Timeline and type in 100. Now I am at one second in the Timeline. To set our second keyframe, since we have moved the Current Time Indicator, all we need to do is go down to our Opacity setting, and I will click and scrub to the right until it gets to a value of 100%. And notice another keyframe was automatically added directly under the Current Time Indicator. Once you have multiple keyframes in the Timeline, you can use these arrows on the left side of the interface to navigate up and down the Timeline back and forth between the keyframes. When you're positioned directly on a keyframe, you will see a blue diamond here in between these navigational arrows. If I move my Current Time Indicator off of there, now I don’t see that blue diamond. So, let’s move our Current Time Indicator back to frame 0;00;00;00. And to animate the logo graphic, I will select Layer 2 and this one will adjust the position. So, press P to open the Position. The order in which you set keyframes doesn’t matter, and since our logo graphic is already perfectly placed, let’s set the keyframe for that placement first. So, I am going to move to the second keyframe using my navigational arrows from the keyframes I set on the layer above, and now we can set our position keyframe by clicking the Stopwatch to the left of the word Position. With that keyframe now recorded, we can move our Current Time Indicator back to frame 0;00;00;00 using those same navigational arrows as before. And then let’s scrub on the Y parameter to reposition the object of the bottom of the screen. As you are scrubbing, if you hold down Shift, the object will move ten times as fast. Make sure you slide it until it disappears off the bottom of the Composition panel. Then you will notice a line. This line is called the animation path and the dots show me exactly where the objects going to be on each individual frame. This large dot here allows me to go ahead and click and drag on a handle if I wanted the animation to move in a different direction. Since I don’t want a curve in the animation path, I will press Ctrl + Z on Windows or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that last change. Now, we can preview our animation by pressing the Spacebar on our keyboard. This is close but not quite. I am going to press the Spacebar to stop playback. I have two issues. The first issue is the fact that both of these elements are animating at the exact same time. So, let’s have the text fade in after the logo gets in place. To do that, all we need to do is slide Layer 1 further down the Timeline. So, click in the light purple area and drag Layer 1 towards the right. If you hold Shift as you drag, notice it will snap to other keyframes in the Timeline. Now if we preview this animation one more time, you will notice the only other issue I am seeing is the fact that the slide is rather robotic. And that’s because it’s moving at a constant velocity and then it just stops. This is called linear motion. And in order to smooth this out, I need to add a thing called ease. So, to quickly add ease to multiple keyframes, all you have to do is just click in the parameter in the Timeline. So, I will click on the word Position. And notice, now both of the position keyframes are highlighted blue. I can go up under the Animation menu and go to Keyframe Assistant and choose Easy Ease. And that will automatically apply ease to both keyframes. So, if we move our Current Time Indicator back to the beginning of the Timeline and press the Spacebar, notice now I get a nice smooth motion to the slide of my animation.

What you learned: Create an animation

CTI (Current Time Indicator) shows what frame you’re viewing in the Composition panel. The CTI also determines where keyframes appear when they are added to a parameter.

Stopwatch (appears to the left of a parameter): Click on a stopwatch to record a keyframe of that value at the location of the CTI in the timeline. Click on a stopwatch of a parameter with recorded keyframes to remove all keyframes from that parameter.

Keyframe (typically displayed as a diamond in the timeline) is a method of recording the value of a parameter at a specific point in time on a timeline. Record two or more keyframes (with different values) on an individual parameter to create animation.

Preview (spacebar): A green progress bar will indicate frames loaded into the cache at the top of the timeline as the preview begins to play back. Look at the Info panel in the upper right corner of the interface to check the playback framerate.

Animate layered Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop documents

Import assets for use in a project.

We are starting this tutorial with an empty After Effects project because there are some important settings to understand when importing layered Photoshop and layered Illustrator files. We will be importing a layered Illustrator file, but the process will be exactly the same for importing a layered Photoshop document. Let’s double-click in the empty space of the Project panel to open the Import File dialogue. Go ahead and navigate to the Assets folder, which is saved right next to your project files in the Work with Compositions folder. If you don’t have these files, you can feel free to follow along with your own layered Photoshop or layered Illustrator files. Once you are in the Assets folder, click once on the Owl_Preserve Illustrator file, and then go down to the Import As option and click on the drop-down menu. Choose Composition – Retain Layer Sizes. I will explain what that means in a second, but for now, with that option selected, go ahead and click the Import button to import the file and automatically create a composition. If we look in the Project panel with that composition selected, the duration is 0;00;10;00 seconds. After Effects will choose the duration based on the last composition you created. So, your composition settings may not be the same as mine. If you ever need to change your composition settings, just remember, you can select the composition in the Project panel, then press Ctrl + K on Windows or Command + K on the Mac to open the composition settings. Then you can change the duration and click okay. I am going to leave mine set at ten seconds. Let’s double-click on the composition in the Project panel to open the Timeline and the preview in the Composition panel. If we look in the Timeline, you will notice that there are many layers that make up this graphic. I am going to hover over the top of the Timeline until I get the double arrows and drag up until I can see all nine layers that make the composition. Now, let’s create a very straightforward animation. I want the owl to fade into the scene, and then the text to fade underneath of it. Let’s hover over the text in the Composition panel and click once. And you notice when that layer is selected, I have control handles that are right around the edge of that layer. The handles only stay close like this when you choose to retain layer sizes option on import. Without that option, the layer handles for every layer will automatically be the same as the edges of the composition, which can sometimes make the animation quite challenging. Now with my text layer selected, which is Layer A, let’s click on that and drag it to the top of the layer hierarchy in the Timeline. Since all the text is on one layer, it’s going to be very straightforward to create animation with this layer. Press T to open the Opacity settings. Now we will animate this in a quick second. I want to animate the appearance of the owl all at once. And if you noticed, there are many different layers that make up this owl. And if you are not sure what part of the owl a layer contains, you can go ahead and toggle the layer Visibility off and on. Now rather than adding keyframes for all of these layers, let’s go ahead and duplicate the green layer and fade that over top of the owl. So, go down to the bottom of the Timeline and select Layer 9. Press Ctrl + D on Windows or Command + D on the Mac to duplicate the layer. Click on the new duplicate layer and drag it up just below our top layer, so now it inhabits Layer 2. Press T to open the Opacity settings for that layer. Since the Current Time Indicator is already at frame 0, all I have to do is to click on the Stopwatch for the Opacity and now I will set my first keyframe. I will move my Current Time Indicator down to one second at the Timeline, and then I will change the Opacity setting from 100% to 0%. And you will notice if we scrub the Current Time Indicator, it appears as though the owl is fading into the scene when in fact we are actually just fading out the green layer that’s above it. Use the navigational arrows to position yourself on the second keyframe. And let’s trim the start of the Owl Preserve layer by hovering over the left edge and clicking and dragging. Just make sure to hold Shift after you start to drag and that will snap the In point to the Current Time Indicator. Since we want the words to fade in, let’s change the Opacity setting from 100% to 0%, and then click on the Stopwatch to create our first keyframe. To move one second down the Timeline, let’s click on the Time Indication and then type +100 and press Enter. And now the Current Time Indicator is one second further down the Timeline. Let’s change the Opacity setting up to 100%. And now we have a second keyframe which, of course, creates the animation. I will move my Current Time Indicator back to the beginning of the Timeline and press the Spacebar to preview the animation. Now creating your layer graphics in Illustrator or Photoshop can often speed up your Motion Graphics CC workflow, since the tools in those applications are custom designed to help you create complex custom shapes and graphics a little more quickly than you could natively in After Effects. And since After Effects will retain the layer settings and blend modes, it’s easy enough to import those elements into After Effects for your final animation.

What you learned: Import layered files as compositions

Double-click in the Project panel to open the Import dialog box, navigate to the files accessible to your system and choose a PSD or AI file to import.

With a file selected, choose Import As > Composition – Retain Layer Sizes to create a layered composition comprised of the original layers created in Photoshop or Illustrator.

The duration of a composition created from a layered PSD or AI file will always be the same duration as the most recent previously created composition.

Layer transparency and blend mode settings will be maintained between After Effects and the originally created PSD or AI file.

Add detail with effects

Apply and adjust effects.

Now is the time when we get to the effects parts of After Effects. Effects are in essence additional settings you can apply to layers to help achieve a specific look or style. Let’s jump right into our project and apply a few effects to visually spice things up a bit. Let’s start by previewing our animation. Click once in the Timeline area to make sure the Timeline panel is active, then press the Spacebar to begin playback. If we look at our project, we can see I have a background video layer, a green solid color wash, and then a logo on top of that. I will press the Spacebar to stop playback, and then press the Home key on my keyboard to move the Current Time Indicator back to frame 0;00;00;00. To start, I want the logo to pop off the background a bit. So, to do that, I want to blur out the background over time. I want the background to start sharp and then get blurry. So, let’s select Layer 3, which is our background video layer, and apply a blur effect. Go up to the Menu bar under Effect, and then you will notice all the effects are grouped according to the kinds of effects. Since we want to apply a blur, let’s go to Blur & Sharpen, then choose Fast Box Blur. Notice the Effect Controls panel popped up. If you need to see the Project panel, you can just click on the double arrows here and go back to the Project panel. Then if you want to bring the Effect Controls back, just click on the words Effect Controls and that will bring that panel forward. Since my Current Time Indicator is on frame 0;00;00;00, let’s add a keyframe for the blur radius set to 0.0. We can do that here in the Effect Controls panel just by clicking the Stopwatch to the left of the words Blur Radius. Let’s move 2 seconds down the Timeline. Now I am not sure exactly how blurry I want this to be, so I will go back up to my Effect Controls panel, and scrub on the Blur Radius parameter just by clicking and dragging to the right. I really like how this pops with the setting close to 50.0. Now I know you are thinking, well, where are my keyframes? I have been applying them and I don’t see them in the Timeline. To reveal any animated properties on a layer, just make sure that layer is selected, and then press the U key and that will show you the animated parameters. Click on the Current Time Indicator and drag back and forth to preview what this is doing. And you will notice now we have added a nice blur that happens over 2 seconds. As the background layers starts to blur at about one second in, this is when I want the logo to actually start to appear. Now to animate the logo, I want to use an effect called the Tiler effect. So, I am going to select Layer 1. And since I know the name of the effect that I would like to apply, I will go to the Effects & Presets panel here on the right side of the interface, click once in the Search field and then type the word "tiler". The Distort filter CC Tiler pops up. I will click on that filter and drag it and drop it right on top of my logo here in the Composition panel. When I let go, it’s going to take a second and I know my effect has been applied. I know it’s applied to the logo because it is listed up here in the top of the Effect Controls panel. Effects are also listed in the Timeline. If we come to the middle section of the Timeline, this area is called the switches section. And whenever you see the letters fx that’s a switch that allows you to toggle the effect the on or off for the individual layer. Now let’s check out the CC Tiler effect and see if we can make this logo animation pop a little bit. On the Scale parameter in the Effect Controls panel, click and drag to the left to scrub that parameter down to a setting of 0.0%. Scrubbing on the Effect parameter gives you a good preview as to what you can achieve with that effect. So, let’s set our Scale to a setting of 0 and click on the Stopwatch to add a keyframe. Now let’s move about 2 seconds down the Timeline, I will click down here on the Timeline and since I wasn’t exactly on 1 second, I will just highlight the numbers and I will type +200. And when I press Enter, notice it moves me exactly 2 seconds down the Timeline. Now let’s change the Scale setting of our Tiler effect up to 100.0% and press Enter. To preview our animation, we can actually go the Preview panel here and click the leftmost button to move the Current Time Indicator back to the beginning of the Timeline, and then press the Play button to play things back. By applying effects, we have definitely spiced things up a bit. So, if you know what effect you are going to apply, you can always search for the effect by name in the Effects & Presets panel. and if you are ever not quite sure what an effect might look like, go ahead and apply it to a layer and scrub in the Effect Controls panel to preview the effect.

What you learned: Understand, apply and adjust effects

Effects are extra customizable settings you can apply to any layer in a composition.

Effects can be applied to a selected layer by choosing an effect from the Effect menu in the menu bar. You can search effects in the Effects and Presets panel, and you can drag and drop those effects from the panel directly onto any layer in a composition.

Access effects in the timeline on a selected layer by pressing E on the keyboard.

Effect settings are available in both the timeline and the Effect Controls panel.

Toggle an effect on or off by clicking the fx button in the upper left corner of the Effect Controls panel, or by clicking the fx button in the switches section of the timeline.

Delete an effect by clicking its name in the timeline, or in the Effect Controls panel, and pressing Delete on your keyboard.